NSFW: Skype, sex, and the sex industry

OK, all the sex stuff's a been a bit much. But I wanted to let you get a feel for yourself. 

We've never really covered Skype in the bedroom. So, in the run up to this weekend's Valentine's Day, I've been sharing first hand accounts from twitter and the blogosphere about Skype and sex.

I wanted to show the healthy, relationship-positive side to Skype and sex. So I went and found it.

In Skype Sex Will Turn Software Hard a college student explains how Skype video supports her long distance relationship with her boyfriend. And in The Dangers of Skype-Sex.. a true story a woman laughs about a hangnail injury during video sex with more casual lovers. Emiliey checks with two budding lovers did u have skype sex? because she heard a rumor.

When the phrase "phone sex" becomes "skype sex," you're hearing a cultural phenomenon go mainstream.

This is great for Skype.

Nearly every technology gets used for sex when it becomes

• cheap or free,
• reliable, and
• many people have access.

Skype is far past that tipping point.

What attracts lovers to Skype are the very things that make Skype attractive to a grandmother vidding her grandkids. Free, high audio quality, video quality at full screen, chat and presence for arranging calls, agile bandwidth management, privacy, and interruption management.

The bedroom is the last part of the home to get technology, and Skype is winning its way through that door.

Downsides.

• Skype Spam. I'm tired of sex spam in Skype chats, IM adverts for webcam sex sites. Beyond the rude interruptions of SPIM (messaging spam), they cheapen the world's perception of my favorite conversation channel.
• Skype Prime limits. Skype forbid selling "adult, sexual or pornographic" services through its Skype Prime terms of service.  Skype's own brand is cute and wholesome. Prime's beta protects that image and avoids criminal issues by keeping the service family friendly.
• Harassment. Women often "decline to state" their sex in Skype profiles. This sometimes prevents unwanted attention. Dina Mehta's landmark report, SkypeMe Eve, showed the dramatic difference between the number of stranger approaches received by men and women.

Opportunity.

I occasionally follow adult industry information technology. In many respects they lead the Internet by a year or two.

• They drove the inventions of payment systems for phone calls and for Internet commerce, long before Skype Prime, PayPal and Amazon.
• They drove innovation in video distribution and cheap video production back in the VHS days and later in the early webcam and pre-torrent download days.
• They pioneered bandwidth management and traffic analysis.

If you talk with young adult performers today, so many of them have sysadmin skills and talk about Ruby on Rails and CDNs and SEO and all the other geekery that boosts the right traffic, keep operations up, and keep site costs down.

Skype's technology doesn't offer the right connections for integration into today's commercial sex services. Skype would need to offer:

• Pseudonymity. Privacy is important in commercial sex services.
• Voice, video, and IM gateways. To pipe video between Skype users and the hosted media-stream management systems that route stored and live video.
• Payment system integration. So you can pay, confidentially but reliably, with Skype credits.

Talking dirty pays well, as you'd expect in an US$18 billion industry. I expect to see the Skype network interop with adult businesses as the technologies and markets mature. If landline and mobile phone companies, ISPs, web hosting and payment services do business with adult service providers, why not Skype?

People using Skype for sex among themselves affects the sex industry. It raises expectations for quality and personal engagement. It lowers expectations for cost and redefines speed and convenience of setting up a video call. Perhaps most important: Skype sex is market evidence that adult IT providers trust, spurring entrepreneurship in two-way video chat technology.

Summing up.

So people's love lives are joining the rest of their onlives. And Skype is just the latest utility to bring people closer together. Saint Valentine would be proud that Skype serves Cupid.

Have a lovely Valentine's Day weekend. Skype someone you love.

tags: skype, sex, love, valentinesday, usage, video

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Set Up and Make CalliFlower Conference Calls from Your iPhone

Over the past eighteen months iotum's CalliFlower has evolved into a complete audio conference call service. While they still offer a basic free service, in January they launched a premium service that provides document sharing, local calling numbers in North America, Europe and Australia as well as a feature that allows administrators to set up, but not necessarily participate in, a conference call. The most important feature is "no per minute charges"; you get "unlimited calling with an unlimited number of participants".

Last week, over at Web Worker Daily, I wrote a post "Search Transforms CalliFlower Sessions from Events to Social Media Elements" where CalliFlower had announced that they had made all public CalliFlower sessions searchable such that they become part of an ongoing social networking conversation. My conclusion:

If you are into social networking by engaging your customers through blogs, Twitter and/or Facebook, check out CalliFlower as one additional element for carrying on your ongoing public customer conversations.

Yesterday the CalliFlower team woke up to learn that their CalliFlower for iPhone had been added to the Apple App Store overnight. (Yes, apparently "it just happens"; Apple uploads new or upgraded applications with no notice.) The iPhone application provides access to all of CalliFlower's features with the exception of document sharing (which requires Adobe Flash - an issue for all smartphones). Set up a call, see your upcoming calls, see who's on the call, participate in the chat wall and, of course, call in from your iPhone - they're all there providing a unique mobile smartphone conference call experience. iotum CEO Alec Saunders provides more details in his post "CalliFlower on iPhone releases" where he states:

And Calliflower on iPhone – well, let me just say that you’re going to love it. We’ve remained faithful to the Calliflower experience on the web, while taking full advantage of the iPhone experience giving you the hands down BEST mobile conferencing experience ever. Here’s a few examples of what I mean.

Check out my Web Worker Daily post and Alec's full description of CalliFlower for iPhone. Also note that CATA makes Calliflower available to 28,500 members. If you have not signed up for the service, give it a try.

Full disclosure: the author is a user of the service for a non-blogging related project with great success. I call in to CalliFlower calls via SkypeOut.

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Skype Everywhere: Coming Soon to IBM Lotus Live Engage

A year ago August IBM's Lotus Sametime Division announced the acquisition of Skype Partner Webdialogs to obtain their widely respected Unyte Desktop Sharing collaboration technology. About four months later we learned, from Lou Guercia, Lotus SameTime's Director of Operations and Strategy, more about Unyte's integration into the Lotus SameTime offerings. In that post on Lou's presentation I asked:

Question: with IBM pursuing excellence on a service that comprises voice, video, chat and file transfer in a secure, encrypted environment, and with the stated goals of "working with their partners", would this not result in a situation where IBM would be licensing Skype technology to provide a comprehensive real time multi-media communications infrastructure?

With announcements this week, including some at IBM's annual Lotusphere 2009 event in Orlando, FL, it seems like that question is starting to get some answers..

Yesterday IBM announced "A Strong Fourth Quarter, a rarity these days". ZDNet's Dennis Howlett, in Can IBM sustain its momentum, goes on to provide some background, pointing out that most of IBM's growth is occurring in its software division. Certainly IBM sees its Lotus Sametime division as a key to sustaining their momentum. Except it appears that IBM has reorganized their SameTime collaborative services into "a cloud-based porfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business" under a new name: LotusLive.

In a press release this past Monday, in conjunction with IBM's annual Lotusphere event, Skype announced:

.... it will integrate Skype™ functionality with LotusLive (www.lotuslive.com), IBM’s new cloud services which are designed to help individuals build communities to work smarter, more effectively and more efficiently across and beyond their own companies. Skype’s voice and video calling will add rich, real-time communications capabilities to LotusLive, making it even easier for enterprises to collaborate in the cloud.

At Lotusphere 2009, IBM demonstrated the new Skype integration into LotusLive Engage, "an integrated suite of tools that combines your network [of contacts] with Web conferencing and collaboration capabilities like file storing and sharing, instant messaging and chart creation."

Today we interviewed Peter Kalmstrom, Skype's Program Manager for Toolbars, who had been attending Lotusphere to assist with the demonstrations. Peter made several points:

• This announcement covers only the first step of what will be a series of Skype integrations into the LotusLive offerings.
• The integration into LotusLive Engage is targeted at "businesses looking to collaborate inside and outside the organization to easily expand their networks..." In other words for businesses that need to include, say, sub-contractors, third party consultants, suppliers and buyers within their business operation processes.
• Within a LotusLive Engage contact profile, "Skype" fields have been added such that when a user clicks on a a name to bring up a profile card, the user can launch a Skype conversation and transfer files with a single click.
• The only additional requirement for engaging in a Skype conversation is that the initiating user must have a Skype client open.
• In addition to Skype-to-Skype calls, SkypeOut calls can also be made.
• Where several contact profile cards have been opened, a user can launch a Skype multi-party call to host a conferencing session.
  
• Due to the nature of LotusLive Engage's web architecture, the resulting Skype access is cross-platform; it does NOT require that the user have a Skype web (FF or IE) toolbar installed.
• A session can then also launch a Lotus Web Meeting (also known as a Lotus SameTime Unyte meeting).

Sounds like the Lotusphere demonstrations got the brainstorming going between Skype and IBM. In a concluding statement Peter said:

"We are enthusiastic about the partnership with IBM and we see a lot of areas where we can collaborate and help each other improve our services. We met with a series of executives at IBM during Lotusphere and the general feeling was highly positive."

At the same time IBM announced Salesforce.com and LinkedIn integration into their LotusLive services. Andy at VoIP Watch comments on the competitive "collaboration and communications" space where IBM LotusLive, Microsoft Office Live and Google Apps are the key players.

With the IBM offering, we are seeing one more example of "Skype Everywhere", in this case, being embedded into an offering that is key to IBM's future success in delivering cloud-based outsourced business services.

Phil will have some comments on the technical aspects of this integration along with where he feels there are "deeper" integration opportunities.

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Skype throws independent developers under the bus to pursue WebEx market

Skype for Mac 2.8's new screen sharing feature signals Skype's move into the web conferencing and video conferencing space led by WebEx. Skype is also building screen sharing features for Windows and Linux clients.

Skype's bundling free screen sharing into Skype's software will popularize the feature to hundreds of millions of people. This makes the market for online conferencing bigger.

The bundling will also kill the freemium business model (try our free version, upgrade to our posh version) conferencing companies use to get customers. This will hurt the following Skype developers directly:

• Yugma 
• Mikogo
• Oneeko
• RemoteCall
• InnerPass
• Persony
• InstaColl
• Gogrok
• IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte
• Convenos
• 800Meet

Back in mid-2005, Bill Campbell asked "Does Skype eat its children?" when Skype competed with presence developers with Skypeweb. Those developers abandoned Skype. Since then Skype competed with video developers, who've abandoned Skype. And with Outlook integration developers. And with Salesforce integration developers. And with mobile developers.

Skype's ecosystem is littered with the bleached bones of third-party software developers. They filled gaps in Skype's product line. They made Skype's network more valuable. They bet their jobs on Skype's partner program being safe from Skype itself.

Clearly, a bad bet.

Skype desktop sharing will be wildly successful. Building it into Skype clients and putting it one or two clicks to add sharing to a call makes it 10 to 100 times more convenient than other systems. Ubiquity will change the way people think about desktop sharing the way ubiquity is changing how people think about video calling.

WebEx-style meeting, sales, training, tech-support, and webinar services comprise a multibillion dollar industry. Skype desktop sharing will be disruptive to the industry: vastly cheaper, more convenient, more social. We'll hunt for market share stats this year.

So while this announcement is great for Skype, the choice will chill investment by software development partners. Platforms must be safe, trusted, with manageable risk. And platforms must foster creativity, innovation, and opportunity.

Skype's choice subverts developer trust. That's one hell of a brand note.

tags: devrels, developers, developer relations, skype, desktop sharing, video, yugma, mikogo, oneeko, remotecall, innerpass, persony, instacoll, gogrok, ibm, lotus, macworld09, mw09, sametime, unyte, convenos, 800meet, partnering, channels

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Around The World with 80 Schools

Kids will learn geography, and maybe a little more about people, using Skype this year. Silvia Tolisano's Around The World with 80 Schools project will help her primary school visit briefly with other schools around the globe over Skype. Short calls to say hello and introduce yourselves. Your school can sign up on the Langwitches blog.

Such a great way to learn it's a big world, people are different and the same, it's a flat world with access only a click away, not everyone speaks English, languages are barriers you must overcome to be a part of the world, time zones matter in a flat world, and seasons differ.

Ms. Tolisano is also known for her great elementary school blogging curriculum.

tags: skype, florida, geography, language, langwitches, blogging, education, edutech

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50 people

I use HiDef Conferencing for my work with DataPortability.org. You can Skype into your conference bridge directly for better audio quality. Free trials through February. But 50 people will cost you about $1 per person per month after that.

Collective Presence Helps Nomads Do The Right Things

Dell wanted to know about "Keeping Productivity High For On The Go Workers" for their Digital Nomads site. Here's my small contribution to the theme.

Presence is a stream of signals you give off. You've seen simple availability presence signals in instant messaging: I'm online, I'm offline, Do Not Disturb. Some of us lifestream what we're doing during the day: I'm in this meeting, I'm catching up on email, I'm making soup. We also give off contextual presence signals: I'm available for lunch on Tuesday if you're a recruiter, my dream date, or someone I know.

Disclosure like this feels strange. At first. And then something unusual happens. We get used to it. It starts to feel familiar. Like being in an open plan office where you overhear small talk, see people come and go. Or having a break room where you catch up with people a little bit here and there.

And then presence becomes useful.

People use our signals. Strangers decide if they should introduce themselves. Colleagues decide when they should interrupt, and for what. And that makes your life better, because the people around you are making better choices about when and how to engage with you.

We use many tools to broadcast our presence. Twitter, blogs, public calendars, job sites, project status systems, IM mood messages. Even simple things like IM and email. So long as the people in your world can easily see your presence and update their own, tool choices don't matter too much.

Presence is a social interaction. You share yours. You consume others'. And through this, you get to know each other in ways that may be more intimate and current than if you were in the same physical office.

Collective presence is what it sounds like. A stream or a place where you can see what a group of people are doing. Where you aggregate your group's presence signals.

Collective presence is a mix of informal, unstructured, casual talk and structured messages. The Europeans in our team are coming online now. The programmers are working through a pre-release checklist. Someone's dealing with a problem today.

Members of a team experience this collective presence through group chats, like IRC's or Skype's persistent chat rooms, or a listserv. At Skype Journal, we augment group chats with RSS aggregators and other software that pull in team member blogs, twitter updates, public calendars, public bookmarks, new photos and illustrations. So all through the day we keep in touch.

Three payoffs:

First, social media and presence tools sustain bonds that help a team know and trust each other.

Second, collective presence cultivates situational awareness. So people make better choices about what is important, what is urgent and what needs resources.

Third, collective presence means you are not alone. When those feelings of isolation kick in, it's easy to drop into the group chat and see what everyone's been up to.

The essence of productivity is choosing the right things to do and doing them. Collective presence makes remote team productivity easier and more immediate.

My toolkit:

• Skype public chats, Skype contact groups
• iGoogle and Google Reader (aggregating news and blog feeds)
• twitter, TwitterBar (so I can post from Firefox), TweetDeck (aggregating tweets), Twype (putting my latest twitter into my Skype mood),
• Yahoo!'s flickr (images), delicious (bookmarks), upcoming (events)
• Google Groups for email lists

See also: Presence evolving, Skype Journal, September 2007. Describes Collective presence, Faceted presence, Presence attributes and dimensions, Presence federation, Presence prediction.

tags: Collective presence, Faceted presence, Presence attributes and dimensions, Presence federation, Presence prediction, presence, skypeweb, social software, social media, collaboration, productivity, work, telework, distance, twype, twitter, twitterbar, tweetdeck

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Skype Public Chats: Redesign the Redirect

Recruiting people into a room from the web makes a Skype public chat useful. The pattern is:

Web badge (on a web page)
–> Skype.com redirect page 
--–> Skype client

As long as Skype is working on it, a few improvements come to mind.

Reform the blob namespace so blob-names are short, even with a dozen hosts. Very long blobs impair our ability to use those urls in email, chat, or over the phone.

Add permanence. Create public chat permalinks that don't change with time. Right now they change with time, as hosts change. We need more permanent links, even if it increases dependence on a referring server.

Preview before click-through. Rebuild the redirection service to show more information about a public chat before a person clicks through. I'd like to see for example,

• date created,
• number of people,
• title,
• description,
• tags,
• moderator name, and
• date (or days since) someone last joined via public click.

Group chat owners should also be able to end-of-life a listing by withdrawing it or by setting its status to retired-but-still-visible-for-historical-purposes. 

Directory. As long as you have the data, host a searchable directory of public chats, for chats that opt-in.

Bonus Points: The directory is an opportunity for community behavior, including comments and feedback on directory entries, integration with event sites for cross posting and updating, and embedding within group sites using protocols like OpenSocial, RSS/ping mesh. This might even become a successor to the Skypecasts service.

Platform. API for search, to extract data about public chat objects. The better to create topical directories elsewhere, and create smarter badges.

Grandfather older public chats to the new services.

tags: public chats, im, voim, skype, directory, find, prime

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Skype Public Chats: Web redirect offline

I went to join the Blue Box public chat the other day.

I clicked on the chat's badge.

As it's supposed to, it took me to Skype.com redirect page.

Usually it gives you a link that, when you click it, sends your Skype desktop client directions to connect you with the desired public chat.

Only this time Skype showed an error message:

"Feature no longer available.
We're sorry but Public Chats are no longer available."

Darn. Nothing to click on.

So my public chats were working. 

But Skype is no longer letting people join them unless I add them directly in my Skype desktop client.

Skype staff say this is not permanent.

So.

1. How might I redesign the redirect service?
2. How might I improve public chats themselves? 
3. What would I like in a Skype public chat Badge 2.0?

Coming soon.

tags: public chats, im, voim, skype

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Another Skype Partner Acquired: VAPPS Goes to Citrix

We have often reported on HiDef Conferencing as a leader in high quality voice conferencing. It's a service built around servers that specialize in connecting up to 500 conferencing participants from either the PSTN or Skype, and managing the call participants' level of participation. Should a participant be connected by Skype, they will hear all other Skype participants across their HD Audio service with all its benefits for providing better voice clarity (thus, the name HiDef Conferencing).

But HiDef Conferencing's owner, VAPPS Inc. has not let their success depend solely on Skype activity; they have been wholesaling their conferencing service to other conferencing and collaboration service providers. As one example, I often participate in (but do not host) conference call and desktop sharing sessions involving Citrix's GoToMeeting service and recently noticed that these calls were using the VAPPS service for provisioning the audio component of the calls.

Friday evening New York Times blogger Claire Miller reported that VAPPS venture capital partner, Azure Capital Partners, had concluded a deal to sell VAPPS to Citrix for $26.6 million plus $4.4 million in bonuses, provided founders Ben Lilienthal and Jerry Norton and their team meet certain goals. For Azure Capital Partners this provides a 3.6 times return on an 18-month investment. From Claire's post:

Azure first looked at Vapps in 2006, but did not invest until the spring of 2007. First, they asked the company to change their business model. It used to focus on selling equipment. Instead, Azure wanted it to charge by the number of minutes people used the equipment to talk because they knew that number would grow exponentially, Mr. Weinstein said. At the time, people talked using Vapps’ technology only a few million minutes a year and now pay for half a billion minutes a year.

Acquisition is becoming the primary exit route for today's start-ups. Build a business and service that can readily complement another service that has capital for acquisitions and you may find yourself being acquired. At least this is one service that is not going to Google or Microsoft. On the other hand Citrix has been a leader in developing virtualization and collaboration technologies along with related services for over 15 years.

Congratulations to Ben, Jerry and the entire VAPPS team on this achievement. It has been a pleasure to watch, and to report on, the evolution of their service over the past couple of years.

For Andy Abramson's Comunicano Internet marketing agency this represents a third client acquisition over the past fifteen months; previous ones being IBM Lotus Software Group's acquisition of Unyte and Logitech's recent acquisition of SightSpeed.

Related posts:

• Fierce VoIP's Doug Mohney also comments.
• HiDef Conferencing Aids Business During Credit Crunch

Full disclosure; in 2004 the author provided business development and general management services for Citrix partner Runaware, whose Test Drive service, built on a Citrix virtualization platform, powers many online software evaluation programs, including Microsoft Office.

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Updates: iNum, Calliflower and Entering "Last Name" onto a BlackBerry

With both VoiceCon and Under The Radar events in the Bay Area last week, there were lots of announcements in the Voice 2.0 communications space; I wrote up some GigaOm and Web Worker Daily Posts to cover a few of them:

On Tuesday Voxbone announced the launch of their iNum Service. Basically it provides a means to have a universal worldwide "local" number that can be accessed through the recently accredited (by the ITU) +883 country code. Last Tuesday I hosted a SquawkBox conference call with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens; a post on GigaOm with more details talks about Geography Is Dead - Thank VoIP. Two other excellent "Voxeo Talks" posts from Dan York on this topic (Voxeo is a Voxbone iNum Service Provider Partner):

• How to get an iNum - a "global phone number"
• iNum and "global phone numbers: a video interview with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens.

A heads up on using iNum; access from Skype to a +883 number is considered a SkypeOut call requiring SkypeOut credits. It's not a "country" covered under Skype's Universal Calling Plans; check out the various alternative means to access iNum numbers here.

The following day iotum announced the official launch of their Calliflower conference call service incorporating premium options for businesses that see its benefits for more interactive voice conferencing through the Calliflower call portal. Document sharing and a much wider range of access points, including iNum access were amongst the new features. And they announced an iPhone application for accessing Calliflower calls. More details can be found in my Web Worker Daily Post: Calliflower: A Complete Conference Calling Service.

Finally, in doing some checking out of a new service, I encountered an Automated Attendant that wanted me to enter a person's last name in order to locate that person in the host business's extension directory. But that presents a bit of a problem when you have a BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard and you want to generate the tones where 2--> "A, B or C", etc. But the RIM people think of everything; there is a relatively simple solution. Find out the answer over at Web Worker Daily in "Entering 'Last Name' From a BlackBerry".

Tags: Voxbone, iNum, iotum, Calliflower, Research in Motion, BlackBerry, Dan York, Voxeo

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Star Trek : The Continuing Mission : Learning Curve

Just in time for Halloween, Learning Curve is out, the third episode of Star Trek: The Continuing Mission. Written by Andy Tyrer, "on the shakedown cruise of the newly refitted USS Montana, the ship is attacked without provocation by a heavily armed unknown vessel. Captain Edwards and the crew of the Montana must defend themselves and come to grips with 24th century technology or face certain destruction."

Executive Producers Andy Tyrer and Sebastian Prooth use Skype for ST:TCM's production, pulling together this audio adventure with cast and crew from Europe and the Americas.

Download episode 3 (42 minutes, 57MB) or its short trailer for your iPod or mp3 player.

CAST:

Captain Paul Edwards (Tim Renshaw), Commander Darius Locke (Stephen Perkins) Lt. Commander Thomas Plummer (Brian Bonner), Lt. Commander McGuire (Patrick McCray), Lt. Commander Kyle Wilson (Gabriel Diani), Lt. Stephen Knight (Scott Martineck), Ensign Susan Palmer (Etta Devine), Lt. Numi Natukov (Tiffany Tallent), Lt. Meechum (Matt Adams), Telara (Corinne Tandy), Lt. Michaels (Craig Clayton), Alien Leader (Andy Tyrer), Captain Pelmon (Sebastian Prooth), Doctor Richard Plummer (Brian Bonner), Ships Computer Voice (Cheralyn Lambeth).

DIRECTORS: Sebastian Prooth and Patrick McCray
SOUND DESIGNERS: Andy Tyrer and Tim Renshaw
ARTWORK: Andy Tyrer

tags: skype, star trek, sttcm, mptheater, drama, scifi, science fiction, workflow, entertainment, collaboration, commmunication, radio, conferencing, continuing mission

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See also:

• Skype connects cast and crew of Star Trek: The Continuing Mission, November 2007
• The Continuing Mission Launched: Fueled by Skype, January 2008
• Star Trek: The Continuing Mission. Episode 2: Integration, September 2008

P.S. I'd have loved appointment listening, narrowcasting Star Trek: The Continuing Mission episodes in Skypecasts rooms with the built in back channel.

Logitech to Acquire SightSpeed. Questions Arise.

According to Tech Crunch and GigaOm posts late last night Logitech is about to spend $30 million to acquire SightSpeed, the video messaging and video conferencing service that recently was selected ot provide the infrastructure for Dell's Video Chat. Congratulations to Peter Csathy and his team. And to Andy Abramson and his team; another Comunicano client achieves success.

Seems like the video calling and video conferencing market is about to heat up. There will be another post later this morning involving an announcement that can bring video conferencing to a much broader user audience than Skype's (though it's not exactly insignificant) and SightSpeed's.
Questions that arise from this acquisition:

• How is Logitech able to continue to partner with services such as Skype when they are now entering the desktop video services market? Logitech's co-operation was vital to Skype's ability to provide High Quality Video.
  
• Or is it a produce marketing acquisition? Is Logitech acquiring SightSpeed simply to have additional collateral software to provide with their webcam offerings? Will we start to see Logitech's Carl-Zeiss optics in embedded webcams on Dell PC's?

The economy may be in recession; it's driving less travel and more audio and video conferencing. They're seeing a rise in customers and use of audio conferencing at both HiDef Conferencing and Calliflower. It will be an interesting winter for expanding user experiences involving desktop video.

Logitech Press Release

Update: Alec Saunders comments on the same theme here.
Tags: Logitech, SightSpeed, Skype, Peter Csathy, Tech Crunc, GigaOm, HiDef Conferencing, Calliflower

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HiDef Conferencing Aids Business During Credit Crunch

HiDef Conferencing, a leading audio conferencing service that incorporates HD Voice when accessed via Skype, but can also be accessed via designated country-specific numbers and toll-free 800 numbers, wants to assist those businesses and professionals who can save travel and meeting costs in today's economic environment through teleconferencing services. As its key differentiator HiDef Conferencing is a server-supported business grade conferencing service with full host/moderator support as opposed to Skype's multi-party conversation service (mistakenly called "Conference Calling").
For their current customers they have waived their monthly subscription fees for the balance of 2008; new subscribers can now have a free trial that lasts until December 31, 2008.
As a free trial subscriber, what do you get?

• Up to 25 participants in a conference.
• Free Web Controls, Recording and Hand-raising
• No reservations required
• Unlimited Skype access duration
• Participants responsible for long distance charges to the country's HiDef Conferencing access number

Recall that not only do Skype-enabled participants have unlimited access to calls, they also have the benefit of Skype's inherent high quality HD Voice wideband audio when both speaker and listener are participating via Skype. To quote Tom Evslin's experience earlier this year:

I used to think the reason I have a hard time understanding people on the phone is because I can’t see their lips and their expressions. Now I realize much of the problem is the terrible audio quality – which we’re so accustomed to – of a traditional phone call.

Landline and wireless participants remain limited to the audio bandwidth inherent to the underlying landline or wireless service.
With an Outlook plug-in it's easy to set up a call from Outlook; calls can also be set up via the HiDef Conferencing website.

• Pat Phelan: HiDef Conferencing gives an amazing recession offer
• PhoneBoy Finds Conference Calling Solution: Score 1 for HD Voice
• VAPPS leaves Freemium for HiDef Conferencing
• VAPPS Rebrands Its Service: High Definition Conferencing

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VAPPS leaves freemium for HiDef Conferencing

Chatted with Ben Lilienthal, CEO and founder of VAPPS, this morning.

Skype Journal: Saw you turned off HiGhspeEdconferencing.

Ben Lilienthal: Yes, we are in the process of shutting down highspeedconferencing.com. In reality, we stopped operating this service almost a year ago when we launched the 2nd iteration of it -- www.HiDefConferencing.com.

SJ. HiGhspeEdconferencing was novel for its Skype integration when you launched it. How has the world of conferencing changed since then?

HighSpeed was the first integrated Skype and Phone conferencing service.

HiDefConferencing.com replaced it and is the first and only wideband, fixed price, better than PSTN sound quality conference calling service in the world!!!

Q. What was HighSpeedConferencing's business model? How is it different than HiDefConferencing?

With the shutdown of Skypecasts last month, we more than doubled the minutes on the service and the number of registered users. Highspeedconferencing relied on payments from rural LECs to generate revenue.

HiDefconferencing.com is targeted squarely at the SMB market which currently spends over $1billion/year on audio conferencing services. That segment of the market is projected to grow to over $2bn in the next five years.

HiDefConferencing.com is the only service in the world that offers fixed price, unlimited minutes plans for Small and Medium sized businesses

Q. Will Skype for Asterisk lower barriers to entry for voice conferencing?

We don't compete with free. If people are going to use free services there are plenty available within Skype itself for conferencing.

Q. How is the shocking news about our changing world economy affecting your plans?

Collaboration, especially the type of collaboration that we have been working on for the last 5 years, which is a product of fearless innovation and delivers high quality for lower costs just happens to be a counter-cyclical business.

In other words, as the economy does worse, www.hidefconferencing.com does better.

People still need to collaborate but they are looking for low-cost, innovative solutions such as www.hidefconferencing.com to replace getting on airplanes, and staying in hotels.

Q. I use HiDefConferencing for weekly meetings of DataPortability.org. What are three features we're probably not using that we should try?

Three features you should use and probably don't are recording, hand raising and web controls.

Also, we will be launching a new UI later this month to streamline the scheduling and invitation process.

See also on Skype Journal:

• HD Voice: "Priceless", January 2008
• High Definition Voice: Bringing Skype's High Bandwidth Audio to Conference Calls, October 2007
• PhoneBoy Finds Conference Calling Solution: Score 1 for HD Voice, April 2008
• HighSpeedConferencing.com - When The Meeting Grows Beyond Ten, February 2007
• The Skype Mega Conference, January 2006

tags: skype, vapps, highspeedconferencing, hidefconferencing, asterisk, skypeforasterisk, conferencing, collaboration

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seeing skype commercials

"I keep seeing these Skype commercials. Anyone familiar with it? Does it work well for conferencing?" -- John Kreiss

(what you want to see from big television spend: inquiry, word of mouth, brand notes grokked)

tags: skype, ebay, marketing, advertising, tv, wordofmouth

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Alternatives to Skypecasts

While there has been lots of dismay about the discontinuation of Skypecasts (Skype's blog posts: here and here), it had appeared for the past several months that the service just did not have the robustness to provide the reliability and quality of service that users would expect. Being a free service, it was obviously placing resource demands with zero revenue potential on Skype developer and support personnel that hopefully can be diverted to bringing feature equality to Skype's basic service, whether on Windows, Mac or Linux.
There are alternatives; in fact, this decision provides a unique opportunity for two third party conference calling services:

1. Skype Multi-Party Calling:

For up to 25 participants on a call, Skype has recently expanded its multi-party calling capacity. The caveat here is that the host must use a multi-core Windows PC and a reliable broadband internet connection (preferably cable). Participants can be on any version of Skype or be accessed via SkypeOut. In this case the host must set up the call and call out to all the participants. More details here. A unique feature of Skype's multi-party calling is its ability to show which participant is actually speaking at any given time. But keep in mind Skype really offers multi-party calling, not a full conferencing service.
2. iotum CalliFlower
iotum's CalliFlower has the benefit of no charge other than whatever it costs to make the connection to one of their access points. I often participate in their daily SquawkBox call via my SkypeOut account; the recent availability of SkypeOut CallerID, displaying my mobile phone number when I make a SkypeOut call, has allowed me to participate in these calls within my SkypeOut subscription without even using the provided password for each call. In fact, there are four options for accessing these calls:

1. Truphone VoIP: A PC, a headset and an internet connection puts you one click away from your conference call.
2. Phone: Dial from anywhere in the world to one of our U.S. or French dial-in numbers to get connected.
3. Skype: Call our U.S. dial-in number from within the Skype network, and get high quality audio.
4. Sitofono call back: Enter your phone number and get called back for free in more than 12 countries

SquawkBox participants regularly call in from the U.S., Canada and U.K. but there is really no country-specific limitation The real gem of CalliFlower is the web-based user interface where participants can see who is on the call, raise a hand, enter text on a "wall". The host can record the call for later playback, mute/unmute participants as well as set up the call, invite participants via email and SMS, and put up the subsequent recording.

As an example of building communities, iotum has worked with Alan Hunkin to provide a weekly interview session, CalliFlower Communiques, with notable personalities such as William Shatner. Immediate future guests include Ken Blanchard, author of "Being a One Minute Entrepreneur" and actor Alan Alda discussions his recent memoir "Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself." Recordings of previous sessions are available at the page linked above.
3. HiDef Conferencing
Vapps' HiDef Conferencing (formerly HiSpeedConferencing) provides high definition (HD) voice quality calls for participants accessing via Skype. Their business grade service involves fixed rate monthly hosting subscriptions involving unlimited Skype access, dial-in to specific numbers in several countries and toll-free numbers. Obviously this involves some ongoing expense to the host but their infrastructure supports providing the best possible voice quality, depending on access mode. The host uses their web controls to set up calls, manage call participants as well as record and archive calls.
Looking at the options it appears the best conference experience comes when:

• hosts are able to setup and fully manage the calls, including an open access invitation;
• users can participate through a web-based experience not only via voice but also via chat.

The good news is that Skype provides either free or low cost unlimited access to any of these services. What will be most interesting is to see if iotum and/or Vapps rise to the opportunity here and and is able to provide encouragement to the many communities that were supported by Skypecasts.
Tags: Skype, Skypecast, iotum, CalliFlower, Hi Def Conferencing, CalliFlower Communique, Vapps, multi-party calling, Alan Hunkin

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Ashim Roy: What Skype means to me

On the occasion of Skype's fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me." You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com.

Dr. Ashim Roy is India Country Head for Stoke Networks, providing local support to network operators in the region. Dr. Roy sent this post called "Skyping at Stoke - Keeping the fire alive."

While happily Skyping away, we often forget to thank the team that created Skype. Some good things in life are still free.

I am heading a small energetic band 20+ networking professionals and we are developing a product to enable better quality of service in broadband networks. My team is in Bangalore, India and the other team is in Santa Clara, CA. Skype has become lifeline for us as we are using Skype extensively for better communications between the team members and that too at no cost. I still have a cell phone and I am certain that within next couple of years I will be using voice Skyping over my cell phone. I am sure you have heard of all this before so it may not be very exciting. However, let me tell you a story which will give you a feel for why we love Skype.

About 3 weeks ago, our equipment was in Japan for an equipment trial. We had one engineer in Tokyo and rest of the team was spread between Santa Clara and Bangalore. Time difference between Santa Clara and Bangalore is 11.5 hours and time difference between Tokyo and Bangalore is 3.5 hours.

Anyway, I received a Skype message around noon in Tokyo (night time in CA) that the software had some problems. We had a Skype session set up between our engineer at customer site in Tokyo and our engineers in Bangalore, who started looking at the error messages (which were cut-n-pasted) into the Skype chat session with a simultaneous Skype voice call. The problem was that we did not have any equipment in Bangalore to replicate the problem so we needed someone to transfer messages showing up on the screen in Tokyo site.

In the mean time, we woke up one of the engineers in CA and included him in the chat session. In about 3 hours we were able to figure out the problem and 2 more hours later we had a patch sent to the engineer in Tokyo before the end of the day. Customer was really blown away by the global cooperation and speed of execution. That evening, I took the team out for a drink and I toasted “Skype” for the success.

Thanks for best communications tool to date.

tags: skype, ashimroy, stoke, globalization, collaboration, communication, whatskypemeanstome

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MeBeam: 16 person video chat, no download

Phweet demonstrates the power of talk without downloads. Phweet triggers voice conference calls through twitter.

Now see MeBeam, multiparty video conferencing, all in-browser, triggered from Skype.

1. Add mebeam to your Skype contacts list. skype:mebeam?add
   (you may have to do this manually in Skype 4b)
2. "Send contacts" to mebeam. This invites them to the call.
3. MeBeam Skypes you the link to a web page where you can all talk and see each other.

A visual step-by-step here.

Free. Pretty easy. Download-free. Live since May 2008. Up to 16 people at once. Son of the WigiWigi project.

Wish Skype could do this.

tags: skype, mebeam, video, conferencing, conference call

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